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/mesand/ - Mesoamerican/Andean Civilizations General
Eli King
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Levi Smith
I'd kill for a total war game focused solely on North, Central, and south American civs at their height, the Mound builder giants are so interesting.
Juan Butler
I might be seeing coincidence here, but so many of the North American Natives remind me of Irish gaels, their weapons, fashion, writing, mounds, everything. It gives me the creeps. Then again the Spanish and others did claim there were mixed race Native-Gael hybrids splashed around the place.
Camden Stewart
Latest News:
telesurtv.net
'Ancient Mexican City Rivals Manhattan Metropolis': Researchers
>Beneath the jungles of western Mexico lie the sprawling ruins of what archaeologists are calling the "new old city" of Angamuco.
>Laser mappings have revealed the ruins of an ancient city occupied by Aztec enemies the Purepechas, with 40,000 structures discovered in just 26 square kilometers, the equivalent of 16th-century Manhattan.
>Beneath the jungles of western Mexico, just outside of the city Morelia and buried beneath meters of volcanic rock, lie the vast ruins of what archaeologists are calling the "new old city" of Angamuco.
>Using a combination of Lidar laser scanning, GPS data and research, scientists were able to create a three-dimensional map of western Mexico and scour beneath the foliage to find the buried ruins.
>Researchers say the metropolis was populated by lesser-known group the Purepechas, one of the major ethnic groups in Mesoamerican civilization who withstood Aztec attacks to survive until the early 19 century.
>"To think that this massive city existed in the heartland of Mexico for all this time and nobody knew it was there is kind of amazing," Colorado State University Archaeologist Chris Fisher told the Guardian.
>Scientists say Angamuco is twice the size of the group's imperial capital, Tzintzuntzan, at the edge of Lake Patzcuaro. According to their findings, the city was distinct in that it had open squares and pyramids along its perimeter rather than at its center, a departure from Mesoamerican customs.
>Among the artifacts uncovered are ceramic fragments which date back as far as 900 AD, some of which support the theory that the Indigenous group underwent two waves of civil development and one collapse prior to the Spanish invasion.
Landon Ramirez
turkeytelegraph.com
Angamuco, the Millenary city in Mexico with as many buildings as Manhattan
>The secrets of Angamuco have taken centuries to be revealed. The treasures of Millenary city of Purépecha, enemies of Aztec empire, had been buried by passage of time in western Mexico and unearthing m had represented a titanic task with traditional archaeological techniques. But a revolutionary procedure has been a ray of light and hope for researchers. The laser mapping, which allowed this Monday discovery of a Mayan city in Guatemala with 60,000 buildings, has now revealed that Angamuco had 40,000 buildings, as many as Manhattan and on just a surface of 26 square kilometers.
>Although city was discovered in 2007, traditional techniques for Mapearla and terrain conditions did not allow rapid progress in investigation. It was in 2011 when archaeologists began to use Lidar technique. Seven years later, investigation has been fruitful. "This technology is transforming archaeology, re are 30 or ruins in Mesoamerica that are being analyzed and that we can learn more about with se techniques," says Fisher, who has a similar project in remote region of Mosquitia, Honduras. The investigator waits eagerly to put boots on ground and to keep revealing secrets of Angamuco. About 7,000 archaeological objects have already been verified in excavations that have covered four kilometres of new archaeological universe of Purépecha.
William Morris
npr.org
The Oscar For Best Snack Goes To ... Popcorn, The 6,000-Year-Old Aztec Gold
>Popcorn is truly ancient. Archaeologists have uncovered popcorn kernels that are 4,000 years old. They were so well-preserved, they could still pop. In 2012, scientists discovered popcorn cobs that were grown even earlier — more than 6,000 years ago.
>Dolores Piperno, a paleobotanist with the Smithsonian's Tropical Research Insitute, says corn, and specifically popcorn, helped lay the foundations for the Aztec empire.
>"When you have a very highly productive crop like corn, that makes the rise of high civilizations possible," she says.
>Piperno grows the wild, great-grandaddy of modern corn — a weird grain called teosinte. It has just a few kernels on each stalk, and they're too hard to eat or to grind into flour. But teosinte has a special property that almost makes up for these shortcomings: It can pop.
>"All early corns were popcorns," Piperno says. "They were around for millennia before these other forms of corn."
>After a couple of thousand years, the Mesoamericans managed to cultivate varieties of corn that were good for flour, but they still ate popcorn. The Aztec language even has a word for the sound of many kernels popping at once — totopoca.
>After the Spanish invaded, popcorn spread around the world, and soon people began to figure out how popcorn actually works.
>It turns out that rock-hard kernel — the thing that makes teosinte and popcorn impossible to eat raw — is the key.
>"It acts as a pressure cooker," says David Jackson, a food scientist at the University of Nebraska. He says the durable kernel keeps water and starch sealed inside. When a kernel is heated, the starch liquefies and the pressure builds until the seed coat breaks.
>Now there's something to think about next time you're stuck watching a bad movie.
Kevin Hernandez
smithsonianmag.com
White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities
>Around 1100 or 1200 A.D., the largest city north of Mexico was Cahokia, sitting in what is now southern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Built around 1050 A.D. and occupied through 1400 A.D., Cahokia had a peak population of between 25,000 and 50,000 people. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Cahokia was composed of three boroughs (Cahokia, East St. Louis, and St. Louis) connected to each other via waterways and walking trails that extended across the Mississippi River floodplain for some 20 square km. Its population consisted of agriculturalists who grew large amounts of maize, and craft specialists who made beautiful pots, shell jewelry, arrow-points, and flint clay figurines.
>During the last 100 years, extensive archaeological research has changed our understanding of the mounds. They are no longer viewed as isolated monuments created by a mysterious race. Instead, the mounds of North America have been proven to be constructions by Native American peoples for a variety of purposes. Today, some tribes, like the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, view these mounds as central places tying their communities to their ancestral lands. Similar to other ancient cities throughout the world, Native North Americans venerate their ties to history through the places they built.
Jace Butler
dailymail.co.uk
Thousand-year-old 'lost' pyramid city uncovered in the heart of Mexico using lasers had as many buildings as modern Manhattan
>Remains of ancient 'pyramid city' as densely built up as Manhattan have been discovered in the heart of Mexico, thanks to pioneering imaging techniques.
>Experts used lasers to send beams of light from an aircraft to the ground below, measuring the reflected pulses to build up a map of the region.
>They discovered a lost pyramid city known as Angamuco built by the Purépecha, rivals to the Aztecs, around 1,000 years ago.
>The discovery was made by a team of researchers, including Colorado State University (CSU), about a half an hour’s drive from Morelia, in the central Mexican state of Michoacán.
>'To think that this massive city existed in the heartland of Mexico for all this time and nobody knew it was there is kind of amazing,' said Chris Fisher, professor of anthropology at CSU who made the admission of missing the finding on foot.
>Traditional methods of on-the-ground archaeological surveys would take 20 years to assemble as much data as two days using the laser-based technique, known as Lidar ranging, according to experts.
>A particular benefit of the technology is its ability to penetrate through vegetation, which is dense in many of the forest areas being surveyed.
>Seeing the results, one of the team realised he had walked within 30 feet (10 m) of one of the largest pyramids on the Angamuco site without realising it, due to the thick undergrowth.
'If you do the maths, all of a sudden you are talking about 40,000 building foundations up there, which is [about] the same number of building foundations that are on the island of Manhattan.'
>The survey is the first part of the Pacunam Lidar Initiative that will eventually map more than 5,000 square miles (14,000 sq km) of Guatemala.
Owen Garcia
businessinsider.com
Researchers have found signs of ritual violence on skeletons from an ancient civilization in the Andes
>Skeletal remains uncovered from a ritual platform in the Peruvian highlands at the site now known as Pacopampa show that people buried there suffered violent injuries, likely as part of ceremonial rituals, according to an archaeological study published earlier this month.
>The scientists behind the discovery wrote that it looks like individuals suffered ceremonial blows to the head that fractured their skulls — perhaps willingly — though those blows likely didn't kill them.
>"Given the archaeological context (the remains were recovered from sites of ceremonial practices), as well as the equal distribution of trauma among both sexes and a lack of defensive architecture, it is plausible that rituals, rather than organized warfare or raids, caused most of the exhibited trauma," the authors wrote.
>The question that remains is why.
>One of the ways that present-day archaeologists try to understand ancient cultures is by looking for signs of violence. Knowing how people were injured or killed reveals conflict with other societies as well as religious and societal behavior.
>Researchers have been able to learn much about the early civilizations that populated the Andes by studying the violence that occurred there.
>Ritual violence did include human sacrifice in later eras, so researchers wrote the the ritual violence here may reflect the emergence of a hierarchical society. In the early stages, ritual violence associated with the dominance of elites resulted in injury that grew more intense as time went on and that hierarchy was more clearly defined — eventually reaching the point where such rituals ended in death.
Daniel Peterson
laht.com
Peru Recovers 500 Archeological and Art Pieces from Argentina, US, Mexico, UK
>Peruvian authorities presented on Friday close to 500 archeological and art pieces recovered in the last few months from Argentina, the United States, Mexico and the United Kingdom, where they were being kept in private collections or were circulating on the black market.
>Some of the pieces include colonial-era paintings depicting Biblical scenes such as the sacrifices of Cain and Abel and The Deluge, which were removed from the Andean town of Hualahoyo.
>The paintings were voluntarily handed over to the Peruvian consulate in New York by Tracey Willfong, who was in possession of the pieces.
>Many archeological objects belonging to different pre-Columbian civilizations from Ancient Peru, including the Inca, Nazca, Sican and Sipan cultures, were also recovered.
>The pieces were retrieved thanks to arrangements made by the Peruvian diplomatic missions in the four countries.
>During the presentation of the objects, Culture Minister Alejandro Neyra put emphasis on a group of archeological pieces that were removed from the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu and returned to Peruvian authorities by Yale University.